The man in the floor began to move. He had one arm lying in his groin and he moved it slightly and pointed. At them or at the height from which he had fallen or to his destination in eternity they did not know. Then he died.
Glanton looked about the ruins. Where did this son of a bitch come from? he said.
Prewett nodded toward the crumbling mud parapet. He was up yonder. I didnt know what he was. Still dont. I shot the son of a bitch out of there.
Glanton looked at the judge.
I think he was an imbecile, the judge said.
Glanton led his horse through the church and out by a small door in the nave into the yard. He was sitting there when they brought the other hermit out. Jackson prodded him forward with the barrel of his rifle, a small thin man, not young. The one they'd killed was his brother. They had jumped ship on the coast long ago and made their way to this place. He was terrified and he spoke no english and little Spanish. The judge spoke to him in german. They had been here for years. The brother had his wits stole in this place and the man now before them in his hides and his peculiar bootees was not altogether sane. They left him there. As they rode out he was trotting up and back in the yard calling out. He seemed not to be aware that his brother was dead in the church.
The judge caught Glanton up and they rode side by side out to the road.
Glanton spat. Ort to of shot that one too, he said.
The judge smiled.
I dont like to see white men that way, Glanton said. Dutch or whatever. I dont like to see it.
They rode north along the river trace. The woods were bare and the leaves on the ground clutched little scales of ice and the mottled and bony limbs of the cottonwoods were stark and heavy against the quilted desert sky. In the evening they passed through Tubac, abandoned, wheat dead in the winter fields and grass growing in the street. There was a blind man on a stoop watching the plaza and as they passed he raised his head to listen.
They rode out onto the desert to camp. There was no wind and the silence out there was greatly favored by every kind of fugitive as was the open country itself and no mountains close at hand for enemies to black themselves against. They were caught up and saddled in the morning before light, all riding together, their arms at the ready. Each man scanned the terrain and the movements of the least of creatures were logged into their collective cognizance until they were federated with invisible wires of vigilance and advanced upon that landscape with a single resonance. They passed abandoned haciendas and roadside graves and by midmorning they had picked up the track of the Apaches again coming in off the desert to the west and advancing before them through the loose sand of the riverbottom. The riders got down and pinched up samples of the forced sand at the rim of the tracks and tested it between their fingers and calibrated its moisture against the sun and let it fall and looked off up the river through the naked trees. They remounted and rode on.
They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heaas had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests. Some of the men pushed forward with their knives and cut the bodies down and they left them there in the ashes. The two darker forms were the last of the Delawares and the other two were the Vandiemenlander and a man from the east named Gilchrist. Among their barbarous hosts they had met with neither favor nor discrimination but had suffered and died impartially.
They rode that night through the mission of San Xavier del Bac, the church solemn and stark in the starlight. Not a dog barked. The clusters of Papago huts seemed without tenant. The air was cold and clear and the country there and beyond lay in a darkness unclaimed by so much as an owl. A pale green meteor came up the valley floor behind them and passed overhead and vanished silently in the void.
At dawn on the outskirts of the presidio of Tucson they passed the ruins of several haciendas and they passed more roadside markers where people had been murdered. Out on the plain stood a small estancia where the buildings were still smoking and along the segments of a fence constructed from the bones of cactus sat vultures shoulder to shoulder facing east to the promised sun, lifting one foot and then the other and holding out their wings like cloaks. They saw the bones of pigs that had died in a claywalled lot and they saw a wolf in a melonpatch that crouched between its thin elbows and watched them as they passed. The town lay on the plain to the north in a thin line of pale walls and they grouped their horses along a low esker of gravel and surveyed it and the country and the naked ranges of mountains beyond. The stones of the desert lay in dark tethers of shadow and a wind was blowing out of the sun where it sat squat and pulsing at the eastern reaches of the earth. They chucked up their horses and sallied out onto the flat as did the Apache track before them two days old and a hundred riders strong.